


Hands meant for Healing

by Saltwish



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-28
Updated: 2013-09-28
Packaged: 2017-12-27 21:48:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/983996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saltwish/pseuds/Saltwish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every Starfleet officer is required to train in self defense, even those in the medical track. Leonard McCoy never believed he'd need to use it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hands meant for Healing

Regardless of job or skill set, all Starfleet officers were given some form of combat training. Emergency self defense, or worst case scenario, you could not be defenseless. Disease wasn't the only danger up there in the black and you never knew what you'd have to do to keep yourself and your crew alive.

He knew that, even saw some sense in it, despite the complaints he'd leveled at instructors, classmates, anyone who held still long enough to hear him. Damn it, man, I'm a doctor, not a warrior. He was a steady enough shot, growing up in the South, but his hands fit better around tools to heal. He didn't want to see someone's insides unless he was repairing damage to them.

In hindsight, he knows you can't always have what you want, but it doesn't mean much.

Medbay is supposed to be a place of sanctuary, where the wounded come to be cared for. According to the accepted standards of war, doctors and their patients are not honorable targets. The men coming towards it don't care about that, from the weapon signatures the ship's computer is picking up. A smaller force than the Enterprise's crew, but they chose the element of surprise, cloaked and waiting until several teams left for the planet below, and using some form of technology that forcibly beamed over a hundred soldiers into the ship's halls.

That kind of warp tech should have gone down with the Vengeance, but someone always wants to make money more than they want to do the right thing.

"Doctor McCoy, you only have a few moments before the second group reaches you in Medbay 1," hisses the comm device in his ear, a young crewman hiding from the enemy to relay instruction to the rest of the crew. She's saving their lives, warning each division as she hacks the computer systems and tracks the enemy movements; she's just an enlisted engineering student but she's got the makings of a good officer. He hopes they make it out of this so he can thank her.

Right now he's got his back against the wall near the only functional entrance. One of the turbolifts they managed to sabotage, fucking with the programming to seal it for the crisis. The other's been overridden and is a gaping, open welcome to the three rooms of medical bay. There are sick and injured lining the walls, some of them transported up from the planet, others crew members who had contracted the potent flu strain, a few recovering engineers from the fire in core a few days ago. There are wide-eyed nurses running around, trying to decide where to stand, what to hold, one of the other doctors trying to keep people calm, getting the youngest and most defenseless in the back while those with more experience in a conflict took positions closer to the door. Half of these people aren't more than 20, a fresh young group they just picked up for a training semester on the flagship of the 'Fleet. An honor, and they're just kids, bright eyed and scared, trusting him to keep them safe.

It's his medbay. It has been for years, and he knows every cabinet, every bed, every face. In minutes or less, it's going to be a war zone.

Swallowing tightly, he keeps a hold of the laser scalpel in one hand, the hypospray in the other filled with enough tranquilizer for maybe four doses. There's another three in his belt, but he can't guarantee he'll be able to get to them fast enough once he's fighting. He could risk it, he thinks distractedly, try to go for nonlethal force and uphold his oath. And if they get past him and the few nurses close to the door, then they're going to reach the injured, the sick, the dying. His patients. His crew.

Nonlethal force, or risk the lives of all of these people he knows and loves. What kind of choice is that for a doctor?

It's a choice he doesn't have the time to think about, with the hiss of pressure behind him and the sound of the turbolift doors opening. A dark shape surges forward, a phaser coming up, and Leonard moves. Training he hasn't thought about in years as more than a way of keeping in shape takes over, the hypo slamming into the throat of the closest man before he ducks down, leg sweeping out to trip the next. There's screaming, one of the injured kids from engineering, and he prays between one breath and the next that the phaser fire hasn't ricocheted into one of them.

It goes too fast to think about, and there's so little thought involved already. Fighting is mindless, anger and desperation making him move, and the hypo gets knocked out of his hand before it runs out, followed by someone grabbing the arm, a twist sending pain down his nerves to the sound of a crack. The noise is muffled under the sound of his heart beating in his ears, pain barely there under the rush of adrenaline and epinephrine pushing him forward. It's automatic to break the grip, other hand swinging up and he feels the hot wet feeling of blood hitting his face before he registers that he just cut someone's throat.

Someone else grabs him, hands in his shirt and a forearm under his neck, pinning him back against another body. There's a gun to his head and some kind of yelling, as if he's a hostage to be taken. As if he'd ever let himself become a liability to the people he's here to keep alive.

It's a stupid move, worthy of Jim's level of recklessness, but the woman holding him isn't expecting Leonard to slam his head back into her nose, the hand still holding a scalpel slamming it into her gun hand. A calculated risk, the angle of the blade hitting her bones causing a reflexive spasm that ruins her aim. The phaser blast misses his head by an inch to scar the blue paint of his wall, leaving a burn across his cheek and filling his senses with the ozone smell of it. She's better trained than he is, but he's bigger and not feeling pain yet, not willing to hesitate. As she rips away from him with a yell, he has the opportunity to slam an elbow back into her face and takes it, and there's a part of him that wants to die for how satisfying the breaking of her nose is.

Someone's grabbing him and pulling him back, and it's a near thing to stabbing them before he recognizes Christine Chapel, pale and gritting her teeth as she talks to him. Talks him down, until he lets her take the blade from his hand.

Others are binding the woman's arms, keeping her still and disarming her one piece of gear at a time. M'Benga is treating a head injury on the nurse that had been closest to the door, a young man named Templer, and the rest of the soldiers are dead or unconscious, sprawled near the turbo lift entrance. He doesn't recognize their uniform or insignia; no one knows who they are or where they came from. What they want is a distant concern right now to making sure they don't get it.

Without most of their security force, it's the noncombative crew members that save the day. Medbay doesn't get hit again after that initial team, and engineering managed to stage some kind of coup- Scotty had no mercy for anyone attacking his lady. The away teams return after their Chief Engineer figures out how to hack the signal blocking their transporters, and the rest is over in a matter of minutes.

It's well over an hour later when things quiet down. The injured are being cared for, and it's a miracle there aren't more of them. The dead are laid out in the morgue to be autopsied and signed off on; it's his duty as the CMO, but he can't go just yet. He's sitting in his chair, a bottle of bourbon unopened within reach, but he doesn't move towards it. Just sits in his desk chair, staring at his hands where they sit palm-up on his thighs.

He's a healer. A doctor. It's his job to save people's lives, and there's blood under his nails, dried in the weave of his shirt, itching in the folds of his eyelids and the skin of his neck. Probably in his hair. A severed jugular was messy and there hadn't been any hesitation before he'd cut through skin and tissue to do the most damage he could.

It's not the first life he's taken, not the first weight on his soul from someone slipping away under his hands, but it's never been murder before. It's like a stain, some kind of toxin that's coating his hands; he can't see it, no, but he can feel it. A deadness to the nerves, a tremble of uncertainty in the tendons that has nothing to do with the plasma cast on his wrist. Steadiest hands in the 'Fleet, huh...

With a choked noise, spine bent deeply under the blue of his uniform, Leonard presses the tainted curves of his hands to his eyes and sobs.

**Author's Note:**

> This was for the most part a look at the psyche of a doctor when he's forced to commit the greatest sin in his own mind, for the sake of protecting his patients. Just random musing. Hope you enjoyed.


End file.
